So far, I'm liking it. There was a long article about zoning board business in my town. It gave me a beautiful summary. I asked for more specifics about one item, and it gave it to me. I've only had it installed for 15 minutes, and so far, I'm liking it!

Thanks for posting this. This information helps to make better decisions on the ballot questions!

As one Admin to another, I'm sad to hear that we're losing a good instance. And, I'm sorry that people ruined your fun.

Thanks for all you've done. All the best to you.

You have to use hashtags on Mastodon if you want your messages to be seen because there is no AI to fill timelines. People follow hashtags and search for them. Then you'll get likes and boosts.

And, you control your own timeline by following hashtags, following people, and searching for hashtags. This way, unlike Twitter, your timeline only has posts that you are interested in. Once you get this set up, it's quite nice to only see posts that you like reading, without advertising and without posts meant to enrage you.

Also you can use https://fedi.directory to find great people to follow.

OMG. Thanks for posting. I run a Mastodon server as well and, oh my, the Mastodon Developers would never have been willing to help me. A wild tale. Glad the fix ended up in the next release. Thanks for posting!

There were two screen shots. I saw them. At least one of them was doctored. That is all anybody knows. How are some people so certain which Admin doctored the screen shot?

@Chozo Interesting thought

@SamXavia I think your friend is a looney conspiracy theorist

Mine won't nor will any of my other 3 Fediverse servers.

I know of a number of Mastodon servers that have already de-federated or limited threads.net, even though it does not yet connect to the Fediverse. Some are even limiting or suspending connections to servers that refuse to de-federate from threads.net and are trying to pressure other servers to do the same.

An Admin has no right to force their personal agendas onto all the people who are on their servers. People are competent enough to make their own decisions and can individually decide to block or limit Threads. I block servers on my server to protect members from hateful people.

I will limit threads.net if their moderation is inadequate, just as I do now for a number of Mastodon servers that don't do much to keep hatred and offensive content off their servers. This won't prevent anyone from following someone or being followed by someone, on threads.net. It just means that people on my server need to approve being followed and that posts from threads.net won't show up in the public timeline.

At this point, I haven't heard of any Kbin instances planning to de-federate but there's a ton of yacking about it on Mastodon. I finally muted the "threads" hashtag to get some peace from it.

For others reading this, there are 2 others that I know well: https://feddit.online and https://fedia.io

You can find bunches here: https://kbin.pub/en

Yes. Your server Admin would have to enable this on the server. They may not be aware that this is available or they may not want to use it because it does consume database and media space which they may not have available.

RE: it seems like the only way to have a reasonable chance of getting decent results for hashtag searches is to be on the biggest server

Well, yes, and no. You can relay with other Mastodon instances and they will share there traffic with you so that people on your instance will have the same content as on their instances PLUS the traffic from all the other instances that are relaying with them as well. So, your server will see a ton of stuff. No shortage of stuff coming in

There's a number of good relays. I recommend these two at a minimum:

https://relay.infosec.exchange/inbox
https://bigrelay.social/inbox

In the Administration section, there's a Relay page where you can put these in.

For the first one, @Jerry is the person to contact if it doesn't enable for you. Not sure how many instances relay with him, but it must be a large number.

For the second one, which currently has 328 instances connected together, you can get more information at https://bigrelay.social/

Hope this helps

It's a closed instance and all their postings are done by their bots. I'm guessing they've chosen not to Federate and that they don't want anyone posting to their communities. Just a guess.

kbin.social must still be having severe problems. Ernest posted this a day ago:

    ernest@kbin.social

    We're experiencing massive delays on the queues today. We're actively working on a solution,
    and I think we're getting really close. Just wanted to let you know ;)

One thing you might try doing is switching to a different KBIN server. The smaller ones are probably Federating just fine with Lemmy and the other KBIN instances, although everyone will have trouble Federating with kbin.social.

I wonder why Ernest doesn't turn off new sign ups on kbin.social and ask people who want to join KBIN to do so on a different instance so the problems there aren't exasperated?

1. Before joining an instance you can go to their /terms page and see if they will tolerate you because you're just making stuff up and your ignorance will hurt and endanger people. Most KBIN and Lemmy servers will, fortunately, not willingly host you because of this.
2. I won't tolerate you, so don't join my instance. So, 1 down.

I think you perfectly got it right. Everything that you wrote includes exactly the same questions and conclusions I've come to.

"It seems like it’s trying to be a link aggregator and a microblogging software"

I think too this is its purpose; To to be a link and content aggregator plus a microblogging platform. Therefore it confusingly has both Reddit-like and Mastodon-like behavior.

It's almost there. If it automatically aggregated magazines and communities into one place on a server as well, I think it would achieve its purpose as an aggregator. For now, there could be a dozen magazines and communities with the same subject that aren't connected because instances have no automated view of what is on other instances and so redundant magazines get created.

Whether we need what it's trying to be, I don't know. For me, I use Mastodon and so I haven't used anything on KBIN except the magazines, at least, so far, in my one week of experience.

I was hoping to store the images directly in an S3 bucket at Wasabi, which is what I do for Mastodon, Calckey, and Peertube. However, this is not yet supported in KBIN. I think only AWS is supported as a hard-coded option.

I tried setting up a FUSE drive connected to Wasabi and I used a symbolic link to point public/image to it, but, alas, the Symfony framework does not support symlinks. Until external S3 is supported, I have to store the images locally. Ernest did post today that external storage for thumbnails is on the horizon. So maybe all media can be externally stored.

Until then, I'm storing them on the local disk. This weekend I'm going to see if I can set up rclone to automatically synchronize the public/image directory to a Wasabi S3 bucket so at least it will be constantly backed up.

When external S3 becomes an option, I'll move the media folder to the S3 bucket and hook it up.

Congratulations! Good job!

It uses PostgrSQL. I'm paying an extra $2/month to keep the database on an external drive. So far, it's only using 151 MB of the 20 GB. I don't think I'll run out of space for a while. But, this weekend, the larger server I move to will come with an 80 GB drive so I don't think I really need an external drive. Currently, the DB doesn't cost anything extra.

But, you reminded me, there is a cost to keeping a database backup. My server is in NYC1. I have an S3 bucket in NYC3 that will be use to hold 5 days of daily database backup, compressed. I pay $5/month for the 250 GB Digital Ocean S3 bucket, I believe.

:) Compared to Jerry Bell, I'm more of the Jerry Jr.